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The Man in the Machine

By Arlon Staywell
RICHMOND — The atheist has said, "We didn't exist before we were born and we will not exist after we die." Is the point valid? Is it more valid than saying something continues after death? Who knows what the truth is?
Sometimes people take those little game blocks called "dominoes" and stand them on their edges in a row. They then knock over one, which falling knocks over another, which falling knocks over another, and so on. Something can be done with that chain reaction to mimic consciousness. If the last domino falling flips over a sign that says, "there is an object" it is as though the set of dominoes and the sign "perceived" or "is conscious" of the object. More complex sets of signs and dominoes can be arranged to say, "there is an object to the east" or "there is an object to the west" depending which domino was knocked over first. More complex and varied chain reactions are sometimes called "Rube Goldbergs" after a cartoonist who devised indirect ways of doing things for artistic and comic effect.
It can be important to realize that the chain reactions are not really conscious. They don't "know" any object is present or not. Today's computers are such complex arrays of chain reactions that it can become difficult to distinguish them from sentient beings who actually do "know" things. You can hold a deck of cards up to the computer's camera and an image of the deck can appear on the computer's screen. The camera is analogous to the human eye. The wiring is analogous to the nervous system, and the image on the screen is analogous, or somewhat analogous anyway, to something problematic throughout history, something difficult to define, the "mind" or the "soul." The computer can be programmed to flip over a sign that says, "there is a deck of cards" and even distinguish cards from marbles or poker chips.
Many people are aware of, sense, something within themselves that is not likely in the dominoes, the Rube Goldberg chain, or even the sophisticated computer. When they talk of life after death it is that knower-of-things or "soul" or "mind" they usually mean. Whether this persists after death is the question. The dominoes, Rube Goldberg chains, chain reactions of various degrees of complexity are called "machines" and the knower-of-things is called the "man in the machine." No slight to women is intended by the grammar, which was rather intended to honor women, and it can also be called the "woman in the machine" or the "person in the machine." Some call it the "ghost" in the machine. The "man in the machine" or "person in the machine" is a frequent theme of literature and art. Among them are "2001 A Space Odyssey" and "Short Circuit." It might even be said that "Frankenstein," the original was written by a woman, is in that category. Much of the poetry on this website is "person in the machine" poetry.
Those are just a few. There are countless others. The greatest classics of religions in much of the world deal with the knower-of-things.
At this point atheists and "scientists" can become a problem. No one can claim to have weighed or measured the knower-of-things. No one can describe or even count its constituent parts. There is the wonderful table of elements, the periodic chart, but no one can claim to know which if any have to do with the knower-of-things. The argument is made that it is "unscientific" to believe in a knower-of-things not in sophisticated computers as much as any sentient being. The ancient Hindus realized the problem and their literature describes how the knower-of-things is itself only knowable by direct perception. The only way to see it is to simply "see" it; there is no roundabout way. When people can "see" it they can be difficult to persuade that it does not exist. "Scientists" totally waste time trying.
While quite many can "see" it during their lifetime strong evidence of its continuation after death is not forthcoming. There is only speculation, perhaps it does or perhaps it does not continue. There are in various religions some incomplete descriptions of the form or manner of continuation but there is no substantial proof available.
Still "Frankenstein" is fiction. Scientists cannot create life from non-living substance. Conscious life, as far as anyone knows for certain, comes only from other conscious life. Lately "scientists" have begun to believe they can describe the origin of life, but their speculation is as much myth as anyone else's. It has been explained how Darwin has been misused by some as providing any explanation for the origins of life, and how we know today that life is far too complicated for that to make sense.
If we found a previously unknown island and found a building on it we would consider that building valid and conclusive scientific evidence that people had been there. The wind doesn't build buildings, neither does the rain. Buildings are too complicated, too specific in design, to have appeared by chance or wind or rain. If you were told the building "proves" that people had been on the island, you would not, could not, reasonably argue otherwise. Similarly there is something called "life" and it consists of machines and knowers-of-things. The machines required for the knowers-of-things were in olden times with old microscopes thought to be simple. Modern microscopes have revealed that the only machines with "life" and a "knower-of-things" are very complicated, too complicated in scientific fact to have been assembled by chance or wind or rain. Life on the planet earth is scientific and conclusive proof that an intelligent designer put it there as much as the building on the island would prove people had been there.
Plain as all this should be to people of average intelligence, the United States has for much longer than is reasonable persisted in support of defeated ideas. Religions are the storehouses of our ethical systems. The theory of evolution has become a godless origin story, a myth really, with the specific purpose of discarding the rules, of destroying the storehouses of our ethical systems.
As previously explained in The Battlefield of the Mind dependence on "logic" alone is inadequate. It might be "logical" to say there is no reason why homosexuals cannot marry just like anyone else. There is however no ethical system surviving the centuries which recognized homosexual marriages.

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